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A 2004 'Top 50' of UK television comedies based on a BBC poll (so skewed). Probably Radio Times subscribers:
https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/top/
A strange mix of the good, the bad and the ugly.
I normally don't like slapstick - but The Plank (1967) is a work of genius.
Norman Wisdom was big in Albania.
I guess like any form of comedy there are good examples and bad ones, the bast slapstick can be as cleverly set up and well executed as any word play or bon mot. But the laziest setups or poorly executed examples of slapstick are just afwful aren't they?
I still enjoy this charlie chaplin scene from 92 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9NfXIXzgnA
The original Mr Bean episodes are mostly physical comedy too but really well written with usually a big payoff at the end that has been thought about. Yes they've been done to death, but there's a reason they're so popular
I remember enjoying "game on" as a teenager and it was pretty popular amongst my friends - stumbled across an episode on some random channel recently and gave it a watch and my god it was awful - really depressing, not at all funny, a thoroughly miserable experience
Rising Damp, Love thy Neoghbour, Mind Your Language - racist as hell!
Not quite old school but The League of Gentlemen was darkly hilarious.
It was post 10
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=th...id:aUbcaE44cSw
My bad, just noticed this is a later version, here’s the original
https://www.google.co.uk/search?clie...id:kKJcR24njrs
You are throwing out the baby with the bathwater with your opinion of Keeping Up Appearances.
Forget about the stupid plots and its middle class appearance of most of the characters. Just sit back and watch a master class in comedic character acting from Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket. There are not many who can carry it with that level of comedic skill. Check out her monologues as Kitty on Vitoria Wood and the ones she did for Alan Bennett, you can see that coming through when she does the one sided telephones calls.
You are judging Bob Monkhouse on his game show period, which was a smarmy persona, but it was the role he played. Don’t judge a book by the cover.
He spent the first 20 years as a performer and scriptwriter, writing for all the big names at the time. He used to write for Bob Hope on his British tours.
Throughout his career he wrote down every single joke he wrote or came across in an indexed archive. That enabled him to find a joke for any occasion when scriptwriting.
He also had one of the biggest archives of film TV and radio shows in the country which was handed over to the BFI. It contained many shows on TV and radio that had been thought lost. It was from this archive that Lenny Henry’s first appearance from Opportunity Knocks, was found after being considered lost for ever.
Not long before his death he did a stand-up show in 2003 for which he invited all the top comedy talent in this county to attend, with many wondering why they invited. By the end of the show everyone who attended were dumbstruck by the quality of his comedy, his career and the all the gods of comedy he worked with during it. It takes real guts to do that.
I felt like you about him until a watched a documentary about him 10 years after his death, which covered what I had written above and much more.